Marc "Maliken" DeForest, owner of S2 Games has announced a few minutes ago on the Heroes of Newerth official forums the reason why are the HoN servers down and what are they doing to resolve the issues:
It is quite apparent that our current systems are incapable of handling what is being thrown at it. This issue was not present prior to being DDoSed. However, all that did, is bring to the surface issues which would have faced us as HoN grew. These are issues we thought we had solved even after those attacks.
We are fevorishly working to solve these problems. We continue to make minor adjustments to keep as much uptime as possible. However, these efforts are not impacting things to the degree at which we need (again, clearly evident in performance). This situation is taken as seriously as it possibly can and we are pursuing multiple avenues to correct things.
I am sure the situation appears dire and I can fully understand the frustrations and lack of confidence. I can't say anything to alleviate those thoughts. Right now, it is up to us to get this right and let continued, uninterrupted stability be the only acceptable response!
Source: Maliken's AnnouncementAlso
[S2]IAmRoot announced earlier today that Heroes of Newerth is having problems with the database load, and that it cannot handle the amount of active players, and that they will be switching to a better and distributed database which should fix all scalability problems.
We are. We desperately want to get things stable. The problem we're addressing (and have been dealing with since beta) is the limited scalability of MySQL. HoN is our first game to ever come remotely close to mainstream, so we had limited experience with managing the types of loads we now have, and I think underestimated the success we could have. Fielding (I think) posted in very early beta that they'd be very happy with 5% of the peak number of dota players (which comes out to 300,000 or something). The forums, at least, show over 4.5M accounts. That order of magnitude makes a huge difference. We've tried multiple types of MySQL setups in the past to try and work around the issues. Now, we're starting to migrate to cassandra, which is specifically designed for being a distributed database. It is a terrible pain to have to realize these things during production, but the database guys are working hard on it.
Source: Reddit HoNCassandra is a database which is used by the Facebook and many other big companies, so it should be able to fix the scalability issues HoN is currently having. Let's hope S2 can react fast and transfer their current system to the new database, so that we can continue to enjoy this great game.
